


If You Can't Take the Heat

by kedda



Series: non perdere la fiducia in me [4]
Category: SKAM (Italy)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Between season 1 and season 2, Friendship, Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Irreverence, Kitchen Chaos, Recreational Drug Use, Snark, conversations about parental separation, garlic - Freeform, ingredient hoarding, munchies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-18 21:21:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16524887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kedda/pseuds/kedda
Summary: "Martino, come with me, they can't even cook." - Elia Santini, S1E2—Elia and Martino smoke, make food, and rag on each other mercilessly.





	If You Can't Take the Heat

**Author's Note:**

> they're such snarky bastards and i thought they were hilarious in S1 ~~save for ep 5~~ so let's just have some fun shall we

“ _Hey_ ,” he hears Marti mumble over the phone, “ _Can I come over to yours?_ ”

Frowning, Elia shifts his phone to his other ear and sets down the playstation controller.  “Uh, sure. I’m not doing anything.”

“ _It’s Gio’s parents’ anniversary, so_ ,” Marti says in answer to his unvoiced question.

“All good zi, the door’ll be open.”  He can still hear Marti breathing on the other end so he waits for a moment.

“ _Thanks_ ,” Marti says finally, and the line goes dead.

 

Elia is completing a victory dance for yet another match won when he hears a couple sharp knocks at the door.  He makes his way over, still dancing, and opens the door.

“I told you the door was open,” he says.  Seeing the terrible expression on Marti’s face he pulls him inside by the hand and sloppily tangos him over to the couch.

“What the fuck zi,” Marti sputters, but he’s laughing so Elia gives him a pitying look.

“Aw Marti, has no girl ever danced with you?  And at your age, too…”

“Hm, I seem to remember the last party we were at very differently,” Marti begins before Elia chucks him into the couch, and the asshole laughs.

“Incredibly rude.  No manners at all. You come into _my_ home,” Elia grouches, flopping down next to him.  Marti gestures at the screen, incredulous.

“Daje, zi, don’t you think you kick our asses enough?  Do you really need to practice?”

“I’ll let you in on a secret Marti,” Elia says, leaning in conspiratorially, “because I don’t think you will ever develop the skills necessary to betray me: I started playing FIFA so I could win bets.”  He leans back, smug. “And so far, I have consistently succeeded.”

“Alright, alright,” Marti grimaces, clapping sarcastically.  They lapse into a relaxed silence and Elia contemplates throwing Marti a controller and just playing FIFA.  But there was something in his voice over the phone and in his face when he was at the door that makes Elia reconsider.  He smooths a wrinkle in his jeans over his left thigh.

“Anyway,” Elia says, ever the master of subtlety, “is everything good?  I wasn’t sure if I should say anything. But, you know. Are you okay?” _Smooth_ , he thinks to himself, _really smooth_.  The problem isn’t that Marti is skittish or unapproachable but that they aren’t really the kind of friends that have heart-to-hearts.  Gio is usually that for both of them, since Gio was the friend that had connected them at first. Over time things had changed and now they’ve become much closer, friends in their own right.  But some strangeness remains, he realizes, and part of the concern he had felt when he received the phone call earlier was the fact that Marti was calling _him_ and not Gio.  Marti goes abruptly still and then relaxes into the couch and glances up at Elia with dark eyes.

“Yeah, things are alright.  I just had to get out of the house.”   _And not be alone_ , Elia hears.  They’re both silent and Martino’s mouth works as he mulls something over in his head.  “I just...I guess maybe you know how it is? When suddenly one of your parents just ups and leaves.”

Elia feels like he’s gotten doused with a bucket of ice water.  He has the sense that he may be looking at Martino too hard and tries to relax the muscles of his face.  “Yeah,” he breathes out. “Yeah it’s...it sucks.”

Martino is looking away with unfocused eyes.  “I just needed to get away for a few hours,” he echoes his statement from before.  Elia lifts the couch cushion on his other side. “I think there was a part of me that still thought they’d somehow work it out.  I think they thought so, too.” He looks down, lost in thought.

“Same with my parents.  I think that’s just what happens in marriage; eventually you just get sick of each other.”  Elia unzips the side of the cushion, fingers questing inside.

“That’s pretty grim.”

“Yeah, well.”  Elia’s fingers brush against the sharp edge of the Ziploc bag and he grabs it, pulling out a small baggie of weed victoriously.  Marti grins. “Perfect.” Elia lets Marti roll the joint because he’s better at it and tries to settle into the couch. It must be some kind of hardwired Pavlovian response, because when he hears the _snick_ of a flame jumping to life he immediately feels all the tension leave his body.  Marti takes the first drag and then hands it over to Elia.

“Gio and Eva need to get back together,” Elia says before he realizes what was going to come out of his mouth.  He lets it hang there for a moment, pulling smoke into his lungs. He was told that he shouldn’t pull that far, that it was enough to get it in the throat, that weed was healthier for you than cigarettes if you smoked that way.  Elia thought that was nonsense: smoking was smoking, and that was the end of it. Marti shifts next to him, drawing up a knee and lying back.

“Yeah.  They should.”  He looks distant again, so Elia hands Marti the joint, fingertips touching briefly before moving away.  “They were good. Together,” Marti adds, pensive.

“It’s funny.  They were kind of an example for me, for what a relationship could be,” Elia admits, and then feels abruptly embarrassed for saying it..  “My parents had been broken up for three years when Eva and Gio started going out, and the women that my dad found after were kind of shitty—it seemed like they were there because they didn’t have anywhere else to be.  My brother’s never dated anyone longer than a couple weeks.” He sighs. “I don’t know. Thinking of people our age as a model for this kind of thing is sort of weird but—”

“No, I get what you mean,” Marti cuts in and passes the joint back to Elia, “I also kind of thought that.  They worked in a way that made me want to find someone that matched me, I guess.” Marti’s hands move restlessly in his lap.  “I thought I had, at one point,” he sighs, an afterthought. Then he laughs but it’s a hoarse, sad thing.

Elia frowns.  “How do you mean? Who was it?”  Frustratingly, but unsurprisingly, Marti shakes his head.

“It doesn’t matter.  It wouldn’t have ever worked out.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Elia has to ask, feeling a chill around his shoulders.  He tries to push himself back into the heat trapped between his back and the couch.

“Because it was stupid, it was nothing.”

“Clearly.”

Marti’s hands jerk up in irritation, gesturing helplessly at the ceiling.  “Really, it’s not even worth talking about.” Elia purses his lips and looks at him.  Marti sighs. “Look, it was some girl that my cousin knew from school,” he says, looking like he was peering out from behind something tall and immovable.  “But she was already dating someone. It’s not all that interesting.”

“You know you can tell us shit, right?  It sucks when we don’t talk to each other, off in our own little corners, trying not to bother each other with our problems.  That’s what friends are fucking for.” He breathes out harshly. “Alright?” He passes the joint back to Marti.

“Alright,” Marti echoes.  Elia rolls his eyes and shoves at his shoulder.

“Oh, relax already, I promise I won’t ask you again.”

Marti puffs at the roach a couple of times and gasps when it burns his fingers, dropping the butt onto the floor.  He tosses it into the ashtray sitting on top of a stack of old _Guerin Sportivo_ magazines, and extends a hand to Elia who dutifully hands him the goods.  Marti begins to roll another joint.

~~~

“Why do you guys like this game so much,” Elia complains loudly as Marti replaces Elia’s soldiers with his own for the third time in a row.  “It takes forever.”

“You’re just a sore loser,” Marti laughs, handing Elia the dice.  “It’s your turn to roll.” Elia groans as he takes them.

“I’m too high for this.  You’re taking advantage of my vulnerable state to...to...to conquer the world.”

“Maybe,” Marti raises his brows, “we should change the format of our bets to board games.  To even the playing field, as it were.”

“As it were, eh?”

“As it were.”

Elia grabs him into a headlock.

~~~

“I’m so lucky to have you guys, you know?”  Marti is nearly laying flat on the floor. Elia’s saliva feels tacky in his mouth, herb-bitter.  “Yeah,” he breathes, feeling his mind float up like a kite.

“You don’t even know.  I feel so trapped sometimes, like there’s no way out.”  Elia feels the kite pull on its string where it’s tied to the base of his skull.  “But then there you guys are! And everything’s better.”

“You sap,” he feels himself say on autopilot.  He reconsiders, and opens his mouth again. “But I feel that.”

“Yeah?” He hears Marti complete his fall to the ground, head bumping dully against the carpet.

“You bet, bud.”

~~~

He hears Marti’s stomach rumble next to him, and moments later his stomach grumbles in reply.

“I’m really fucking hungry,” Marti says, reading his mind.

“Yeah.”  A beat of silence passes.

“No, like.  I’m _really_ fucking hungry.”  Marti thwacks a hand down on Elia’s stomach, but he doesn’t have the energy to recoil.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Elia says, sitting up, “we could order pizza.  Or we could make something.” He feels his thoughts slowly slot together like Rummikub tiles on their rack.  Marti groans from the floor.

“We’re saving up for Greece though, right?”

“Shit, you’re right.  Can’t it be July already?”

“I’ve been eating box curry for the last few weeks.  The lady at the store looks sad every time she sees me now.”

“Zi, that’s fucked up,” Elia laughs and he heaves himself to his feet.  “C’mon let’s make some food. _Real_ food.”

‘Real food’ in the Santini household is blessedly in abundance.  “The only thing that we can’t touch is this,” Elia says, poking a stack of several packets of beef, “because my brother will kill me.  Everything else is fair game.”

“Okay, okay…” Marti perusing the fridge’s selection.  He turns to Elia. “We should do a cook-off. Once and for all.”

Elia smirks.  “I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with here, Rametta.”

“Oh, I know exactly who I’m dealing with Santini.” He gestures to the inside of the fridge.  “Forty seconds to pick out ingredients, we have different sides of the stove. The only difficulty is finding an impartial judge.”

“Matteo should be home soon anyway.”

“He’s your brother!  That’s not impartial.”

“Dude, it’s _because_ he’s my brother.”  Marti gives him a suspicious look but relents.

“Fine.  I’ll set the timer.”  He pulls out his phone, clicks around, and turns the screen to Elia and slowly lowers his thumb.  “Starting…. _now_.” He throws his phone onto the counter and, shoulders crashing together, they crowd in front of the fridge.  Several times Elia goes to grab something Marti’s already there pulling it into his arms (which are, for the record, longer than Elia’s and probably an unfair advantage but who’s counting).  He manages to snag a bundle of artichokes, butter, and a lemon before grabbing all the tomatoes on the counter and bringing them over to his side of the stove. Marti gives him a betrayed look but then he squats down and grabs a can of plum tomatoes in oil out of the cabinet there.  Elia’s eyes go wide as he sees that Marti has amassed the pancetta, mozzarella, chicken breast, parmigiano, and zucchini.

“How the hell do you know where everything is?”

“I case the joint every time I come over.”

“That’s fucking creepy, zi.”  

Marti shrugs, grinning.  “Are you ready to lose?”

“Impossible.  Set the timer for forty minutes.”

 

For the next twenty minutes Marti jealously guards his hoard like he thinks Elia is going to steal from him, which offends Elia deeply.  Not to say that it’s not justified, but it’s the principle of the thing.

It’s for this reason that Elia schemes, timing it so that when Marti ducks to check on the oven he pounces.  He’s taken the pancetta, parmesan, and spinach before Martino can jump him.  
“ _What?!_ Are you fucking kidding me,” Marti yells as he tries to grapple him down but Elia is wiry and his brother is a boxer, so with a final twist he places the ingredients on his side of the stove triumphantly.

“Get fucking _wrecked_ Rametta!” he shouts gleefully.

“Oh don’t worry, you’ll be paid back _in full_ ,” Marti hisses, viciously stirring the bucatini.  “Also I was going to use the pancetta to make the amatriciana, so I hope that’s your plan because I’ve been thinking about it for the last hour and a half.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Elia says airily, plunging another artichoke head into hot oil.

Marti brandishes a spatula at him.  “I know where you live Elia Santini,” he threatens.  Then he looks at his pot of boiling pasta and sighs. “What will I do with all this bucatini now?  Elia,” he says suddenly, “we will just have to make a joint dish. I would have won with that amatriciana.  Consider this a compromise.” And then he brings his hands together and pleads. “Elia, you are the only brother I have.”  

Elia shoves at him, laughing.  “You’re an idiot. And no, that’s Giovanni.”

“My other brother!”  He sticks his prayer-hands in Elia’s face, returning every time Elia bats him away.

“ _Basta, basta, basta_ , alright, I’ll make it!  My god, you are _not well_ ,” he adds when Marti mimes kissing a rosary and lifts a hand up to heaven.

“We are Italian, Elia; amatriciana is our cultural heritage.”

~~~

Elia is having trouble peeling garlic cloves and while he wants to just ask Marti to do it - he’d peeled six cloves in fifteen seconds flat - he does have his pride and this _is_ supposed to be a competition.  He’s fumbling at his second clove when Marti plucks it out of his hand, gently crushes it under the flat of his knife, shucks off the paper-thin skin, and hands it back.

“How?”

“Practice.”

It’s a few minutes later when Marti catches him crunching down on a clove.  He looks mildly horrified, but Elia just shrugs. “There are a lot of health benefits to consuming raw garlic,” he says.

 ~~~

“Elia.”

He hums, arranging the onions around the fish in the pan.

“Elia.”

“What.” He looks up and Martino is eyeing the plate of artichokes.

“Zi...I mean…” Both their stomachs grumble loudly.

“Why not.”

They demolish the plate and only just barely refrain from eating the last one so that it can be judged.  This _is_ a competition, after all.

 

At the end of it all they have seven dishes: bucatini all'amatriciana, stuffed zucchini, carciofi alla giudia (well, only one's left, so carciof _o_ ), breaded chicken parmesan, braised fennel, baccalà; and fried rice with peas, carrots, and egg.  Matteo’s arrival made them cooperate to get the meal done faster and ten minutes later they had everything plated.

Laying the final dish on the table, Marti sits down next to Elia across from Matteo, who looks disconcerted under the weight of their combined attention.

“You know you guys are fucking weird, right?”

“Just start eating.”

“Please.  We’re so hungry.”

“This is may be the weirdest thing you guys have done high but,” Matteo serves himself a chicken cutlet, “I won’t question it since I benefit from it.”  He serves himself generously from each dish and begins to eat.

After a minute or so it becomes apparent that he’s not treating the meal with the appropriate professional distance of a food critic and is, instead, eating his dinner.

“Matte,” Elia appeals, “come on, who won?”

“You guys still care about this?”

Elia gestures incredulously to the table and looks back at Matteo, who sighs.

“Fine,” Matteo begins, leaning back and pointing to each dish, “Amatriciana gets a 10, the baccalà was unusual but good so 7, fried rice will always get a 10 from me,” Elia grins, “fennel is weird so 4,” Marti groans, “chicken is a 10, carciofo 9, and the zucchini gets an 8, which is pretty high for something that is mostly water.”

Elia throws his hands in the air and grins while Marti pouts.  “How the hell was I supposed to know he didn’t like fennel?”

“That’s what you get for trying to be fancy.”

“Whatever, I’m gonna eat.”

 

Elia is pleasantly full when he walks Marti to the door later that night.  He’d offered to let Marti stay over but he’d been waved away. “No it’s fine.  My mom’ll worry and it’s best if I go over now,” Marti had said, and Elia felt the wall come up again.  It wasn’t unexpected, but it made Elia a little sad. When he’d first met Martino he wasn’t sure what to make of Martino’s happy-then-sad presence at Gio’s side; they’d be co-conspirators one minute but in the next Martino would draw away to a place only Gio could reach him.  Friendship, he figures, doesn’t happen overnight. _But surely_ , an unwelcome voice in the back of his mind mutters, _several years are enough?_  

He crosses his arms and leans against the wall while Marti puts on his shoes, watching for the things Marti may not be saying.  He certainly looks tired; better now though than how he looked when he first came in all pale and nervous energy. When Elia first opened the door earlier today he hadn’t taken the time to really look at Marti, had just understood that Marti needed something normal and had done his best to drag him out of whatever space he’d been in.  Now he tries to remember what he’d seen before he’d pulled Marti in. There was something oddly vulnerable about him hovering over the threshold, swaying slightly like the walls wouldn’t come up anymore to support him. And maybe upon seeing that Elia had instinctually gone to bolster those walls by pretending everything was normal; the same walls that keep Elia out now.   _Am I complicit in his alienation?_ he thinks, unwillingly.

    Marti looks at him now, an idle smile on his face.  Elia pushes himself off the wall, going to make his goodbyes, when he sees Marti’s face change before him.  Marti frowns, looks away, looks down, looks back up, and before Elia can ask what’s wrong he finds himself enveloped in a Martino Rametta patented hug.

“Thanks for today, zi,” he says against his ear, voice rough.  Elia feels the warmth of Marti’s chest against his, the stutter of Marti’s breath, and briefly tightens his hold.

“Anytime Marti.  Anytime."  He feels Marti smile, cheek moving against his hair, and closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> the tag that AO3 provided 'garlic - Freeform' is honestly better than anything this work has to offer.  
> i listened to “Virile” by The Blaze when i wrote this. the mv is so freeing to watch - and you know what, watch their mv “Territory” while you’re at it, it’s gorgeous.  
> (copy paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 for _Virile_ ,  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s for _Territory_ )  
> ((...also elia's fave "Gaetano" by Calcutta, natch))


End file.
